After the first day's intense TDM matches, QuakeCon's second day promises even more exciting, fast paced action, as the CTF tournament kicks off. Top American teams including BREAK, and f-eM!, will look to defend their decade-old run as the king of flags, facing off against stiff European competition. Will the titans fall, or will they continue their remarkable run? Tune in today at 11:00 CDT.

tox came the very same route his forefathers took across the Atlantic, clinging to a plank of wood much like them, to claim what's his. Or why else do you think had he to leave his shaving gear behind?

Basically people who won't win (out of the top4 i'd say) are better off doing stuff like throwing the first round and then throwing 1 map and the cap difference in the following rounds (depending on other results) to get worse opponents and then get the paired down team and get even worse opponents in the decisive rounds :))))

That's what happened to Anything is Possible and the Chilean team to get 5th and 6th place in tdm. And totally fucked Rapha's team shot at the overall title.

Did it really fuck their FEM's chance of overall title? I mean they have a score of 10 and a Buchholz score of 25 so if they do well in ctf and duel they could probably take a top three position. If MD and Break have really bad ctf day and 1v1 day they could even win but that won't happen probably. But Break and MD are good teams and have good duelers so they probably are really the best.

Who you play matters greatly on your final record. And who you play is decided in a flawed way in this tournament.

If you think nothing is wrong with this system after Anything is Possible placed 5th by beating the 15th, 11th and 12th seed i'll just stop answering you from now on.

I used rapha's team as an example because they are the most notable team with a chance to get a win in the final overall tournament. There are many fuck ups possible in this tournament.

And even tho you control your own destiny that's really true ONLY for the top3-4 teams in each mode.
The tournament is not only based on luck in the pairings, but also rewards losing matches\maps early if you are out of the Finals. This also make the system exploitable.

Pairings for round 2 looked reasonably ok based on the above (but I'm not 100% sure the above is what they had).

Can't be bothered to do the rest.
I don't know if Challonge did the pairings automatically or if they had to be done manually. I suspect the latter. So I don't know if or how much they deviated in round 3 & 4, there certainly is room for manipulation. (Already round 2 did not seem to be 100% consistent.)

I still think it doesn't matter all too much in the grand scheme of things. If you want to win the section or the overall tri-master you have to score big, which is what the teams who are currently in the lead (afte tdm & ctf) did.

agreed the whole tournament is not designed to have close games but to have the best playing against the best the fastest way possible. Since I'm already at the negative points of this awesome tournament: production:you suck. we can hear you talk, your connection of interview room to casters is flawed and why the fuck is there no second stream. instead of staring at the brackets for 30 minutes we could just watch random matches without commentary you know.

i know i know quakecon is always drama but this is the 20th time, can only once things go right? Im not saying everything is wrong but after 20 fucking years a detailed schedule earlier than 5 minutes before the tournament would be nice. and a production that turns on the sound when people talk would be appreciated.

the tournament is way more fucked up than that.
A swiss with normal swiss pairings and tiebreakers would be very good alongside good seedings.
Here some teams are literally better off being on the lower side of the standings and abuse the flaws to get good opponents round 2, 3 and 4.

It's not about losing early per se. Both "Anything is Possible" and "Found Em" lost in the 2nd round. But then AIP got 2 bad opponents in rounds 3 and 4, while Found Em got a strong opponent in round 4. As a result AIP ended up with more points than Found Em, even though they are obviously worse.

How did that happen?

The deciding moment obviously was round 3, when AIP only won 2:1, but Found Em won 3:0. Due to this, AIP had fewer points than Found Em and got an easier opponent than them in round 4.

In conclusion, the system doesn't reward losing early by itself, it rewards losing once and then keeping your score on a level low enough to get an easy opponent in round 4.

TL;DR
If you're 1:1 in matches after 2 rounds then, in the 3rd round, winning 2:1 is preferable to winning 3:0, because that way you increase your chances of beating your round 4 opponent.

edit:

Basically people who won't win (out of the top4 i'd say) are better off doing stuff like throwing the first round and then throwing 1 map

the losing 1 map additionally is exactly my point and what i tried to explain in the tdm thread.
But be sure: what happened to AiP is not the more extreme case. If you lose the first match and then win 2-1 the second match (with additional twitching regarding the caps if needed), you'll get the worse of the 1-1 teams in the second round and the worse of the 2-1 teams in the third.

But: There are some mitigating circumstances. This kind of stuff was available to see in the Swiss test that syncerror made available months ago. So, all teams could have known this and could have manipulated the system in their favor. E.g., Found Em could have intentionally lost one map, but they didn't.

oh yes. Those're both right.
Me personally, I just noticed this shit mainly because i tought it was an everybody plays everybody event till 2 days ago or so when i realized there was not enough time and Noctits said to me it was 4 rounds (the rules make sense for a everybody plays everybody event) and one of the most fucked up situations instantly happened.

It would be so funny if Found Em did well in CTF and duel (which is quite likely), and then barely missed out on the overall triathlon championship because of getting fucked over in TDM. I'm rooting for this to happen.

(However, if this doesn't happen, that also means that the TDM pairings fuckup doesn't matter too much.)

You don't need Swiss pairings in an all play all event: that's just a round robin.

The Swiss pairing system was specifically designed for events where everybody can not play everybody. (But also with many more participants in mind. In chess open Swiss tournaments can have several hundred participants for example.)

-yes the swiss pairing system has existed for a long time and I have partecipated in no less than hundreds of swiss tournaments across various games and sports.
In 0 of them the pairings were 1-51 50-100 (coz placements mattered) instead of 1-100 and the guy with the best record being paired down.

-i know, but you need better pairings. I'm not advocating against pairings in general, just these retarded ones.

- Should have added "_this_ tiebreaker system". A better one, as i said in 100 posts already, is based on strenghts and rating of the opponents mostly and in minimal part to what is central here.

-yes the swiss pairing system has existed for a long time and I have partecipated in no less than hundreds of swiss tournaments across various games and sports.
In 0 of them the pairings were 1-51 50-100 (coz placements mattered) instead of 1-100 and the guy with the best record being paired down.

- Should have added "_this_ tiebreaker system". A better one, as i said in 100 posts already, is based on strenghts and rating of the opponents mostly and in minimal part to what is central here.

Problem here is that we don't have ratings and "strengths of the opponents" is subjective.
They used "strengths of the opponents" for the initial seedings, but you can't really use that for tie-breakers.

Strenght of the opponents is based on the record of your opponents when you face them and their record in the rounds afterwards. It's a complicated equation that has been perfected with time and is in use in many games. There are programs that basically do everything for you in that sense. And that's how you properly run a swiss tiebreaking system in a tournament where placements matter.

Yes, i know that system you people keep fucking posting. And i'm telling you that way it's retarded and basically no game uses it THAT way nowadays.
It's laughable that you can't see the problem in pairing like that, saying stuff "well the tops seed won anyway so what's the problem". Are you being intentionally think or are you just a qcon admin :D????

Strenght of the opponents is based on the record of your opponents when you face them and their record in the rounds afterwards. It's a complicated equation that has been perfected with time and is in use in many games. There are programs that basically do everything for you in that sense. And that's how you properly run a swiss tiebreaking system in a tournament where placements matter.

This I agree with. Some sort of performance rating for the tournament.
But what I wonder, these systems, do they work with only four rounds?

Yes, i know that system you people keep fucking posting. And i'm telling you that way it's retarded and basically no game uses it THAT way nowadays.
It's laughable that you can't see the problem in pairing like that, saying stuff "well the tops seed won anyway so what's the problem". Are you being intentionally think or are you just a qcon admin :D????

Sorry but I've played in Swiss chess tournaments and they do use that system.
And no I don't see the problem in pairing like that.
To be fair I'm not an expert, so I'm willing to believe I could be wrong.
I do know that these things are tricky, and that -as far as I know- the Swiss pairing system was not designed with only four rounds in mind, or few players.

In short: I'm willing to believe the Swiss pairing system is not ideal for this tournament. (Though it did not seem to work that badly in my opinion, regardless of what you have been saying.)

It's just that you seem to be bringing in arguments that I thought are not entirely valid.

Also keep in mind that they needed some sort of tournament system where they could tally up and combine results of three separate events (tdm, ctf & duel) and have limited time (no round robin possible).

I am much too drunk too check all of that information but I respect you as a person knowing stuff about quake so im gonna buy it for now.

fact is i dont feel like this tourney is designed to be close. on my side are the brackets that speak a clear 3-0 language if you know what i mean. but then again with only 1 stream why would it matter if there are close games next to the high rollers

The point is: Found Em only got 10 points, which basically makes winning the overall triathlon impossible for them. If they had thrown one map against some noobs instead of beating them 3:0, they would probably have ended up with 14 points. That's how the system works and that's kind of bad.

we should also mention again the 1st seed vs 9th seed and 8th vs 16th as a pretty big travesty.
That way the teams from south america, seeded in the early 10s, had to play 102 and AVG instead of potentially upsetting the mid-NA teams.
It also makes for weird pairings: Break vs MD in the second round is another example. Essentialy the 5th seed got vs the 1st instead of having a chance to upset the 4th (IG). Which they did in the end out of pure luck of the pairings.

Yeah... I think I agree. At this point, It seems like you'll get the overall championship either by (a) owning in all 3 disciplines or (b) getting lucky pairings due to a badly designed tournament system.

It's just the standard way of pairing in Swiss. The reason being that normally you keep up that logic for the rest of the tournament.

The logic being that in Swiss pairing you divide the whole field in groups with the same amount of points. You then split each group in half and pair the top half against the bottom half. In the first round everybody has 0 points, so there is only one group, so you get 1-9, 2-10 etc.

With your system (1-16, 2-15 etc) the top teams all win and about half of the middle teams win (as they will be paired against each other), so for the second round the group of winners contains all the top teams + a bunch of middle tier teams, which will gave strange seedings if you keep up that logic.

Ultimately, with the standard system and enough rounds, everybody will get a fair shot at the title, it should even out in the long run. But of course more rounds is always better.

With your system (1-16, 2-15 etc) the top teams all win and about half of the middle teams win (as they will be paired against each other), so for the second round the group of winners contains all the top teams + a bunch of middle tier teams, which will gave strange seedings if you keep up that logic.

I don't see a problem with that, you just made it sound confusing with your phrasing. For the second round, the group of winners contains (a) the top teams and (b) the better half of the middle tier teams; and the group of losers contains (a) the low tier teams and (b) the worse half of the middle tier teams.

This sounds perfect to me. We have already gotten some information on who are the better teams among the mid tier teams.

The next rounds can continue the way they did at Quakecon. The good thing is: All mid tier teams had a decent, fair chance of starting with a win. See below:

Ultimately, with the standard system and enough rounds, everybody will get a fair shot at the title, it should even out in the long run. But of course more rounds is always better.

With 4 rounds, it's obvious that not everybody gets a fair (or even relatively equal) shot at the title.

The #9 seed gets destroyed in the first round against the #1 seed and that's it for him. The #8 seed, however, gets an easy win against the #16 seed.

So the difference between being seeded #8 and #9 (which is a highly subjective and unreliable seeding) is either starting with a 99% loss or a 99% win. That's so obviously unfair, I don't even know how anybody can *not* see this.

With my round 1 pairings, the #9 seed will play against the #8 seed first, so we'll actually find out who's the better team and both get a fair chance of starting with a win. Much better, isn't it?

edit: Sure, some collateral damage comes with my initial pairings. E.g., the #16 seed now gets destroyed by the #1 seed instead of the #9 seed. But that's also what happens in regular Single Elimination brackets, so it's the standard in a lot of tournaments. I think that's totally acceptable and much more acceptable than giving the #8 seed a huge advantage over the #9 seed.

MD's schedule was by far the hardest of any team. If Break had to play Avg and 102 after MD, then they probably would have had 5 points instead of 15. So much luck involved with the tournament setup and seeds. Having 2nd or 4th seed was better than having 1st or 3rd seed.

I really miss the old days when we had GTV or even in the early times of streaming where two regular bros would cast some duel tournament and just hop into every fucking game. If 1 game is a blowout they'd be like fuck it, next game even at 6-7 minute mark. And repeat. We'd see so much quake it would be awesome.

Now we have 2 faggots trying to be professional for a stream of 900 people, 300 of which don't give a fuck and are waiting for the bawls chugging or whatever.

JUST SHOW ME SOME NIGGAS GETTING SHOT BY OTHER NIGGAS. HOW HARD IS THAT?

fuck

edit: why doesnt some 4 eyed fuck create GTV with ads for all these popular games and sell it and make a 10 mil and retire young? c'mon you fucking geeks get on that shit and throw me a bone for giving you an idea. Sell it to RIOT/valve/ etc dont forget my cut btw shit

11:00 a.m. texas time and 18:00 berlin time the show started with a bimbo game whitewash at 3k viewers. the 2 faggots can at least explain a bit of whats going on rather than repeating "that aim by tox" they only have a bit less to a decade of experience in knowing and talking about quake but w/e .

why doesnt some 4 eyed fuck create GTV with ads for all these popular games and sell it and make a 10 mil and retire young?

because nobody else did it before. i hope i lifted all of life's secrets that you seem to have so much trouble with

I don't know what kinda noobs you think are watching this stream but some of us are waiting for the marriage proposals followed by that angry bald guy that talks every year when some asshat runs up, grabs the mic and yells FUCK HER RIGHT IN THE PUSSY.

I thought the production was good enough. The thing that I noticed and didn't like was it was hard to tell if you were speccing a blue or red person without making an bit of an effort to look at the name. If if you dont know the teams then it would be difficult to know wtf is going on.

I always thought the following message in quake 3 was fine where the players name was upper center of the screen. Just put the name there and make it red or blue and then it's fine.

agree, the color font from the HP and ARMOR icons is not clear enough, hard to distinguish what team you are following. Other than that the spec HUD is very good, is actualy the very first time i enjoyed watching a little of TDM.

On the off chance that you're not asking a rhetorical question... Yes, I know. :P I was only joking around. I've basically used steam since in 2002. Or was it 2003? I don't remember. I know you needed it for CS, though.

id imagine 8 duel games since they're 1/2 as long as tdm/ctf. but yeah I think a lot of people misunderstand how this system works and how many games can be streamed. I also have no fucking clue how they have like a thousand seat BOYC but they can't add another computer setup for stream, so other games could be covered (fem vs 102 from yesterday, along w/ many others) ?

I also have no fucking clue how they have like a thousand seat BOYC but they can't add another computer setup for stream, so other games could be covered (fem vs 102 from yesterday, along w/ many others) ?

It's only an hypothesis but I think it might be related to the fact that there is a huge BYOC, yes. I'm sure the QuakeCon team blocks most big downloads and streams but with how so many popular games don't have public server binaries and (clients) need to communicate with the internet, there's probably a huge bandwidth demand from this side.

In 2014, traffic between QuakeCon and the Internet was roughly 33.3TB down and 5.5TB up. Traffic between the tables and the core came in at roughly 5.8TB in and 54.4TB out.

We aggressively cache as much internet content as possible to maximize our available bandwidth. The caching causes the reported internet consumption to appear lower than the total traffic seen by the core and tables.

What kind of internet connection does the BYOC have?

AT&T provides the event with two 1Gbps links to the internet, and traffic is load-balanced between those two connections.

Why, because I'm using the American flag and not the German? Or is it because I'm with my fellow Europeans on this one? You can actually pick and chose when you're American/German on which side you prefer at times. :D

Something totally missing this year are player cams, which were available previous times. At least a general cam of the playing are while theyre warming up, it feels really detached to have a lan but no video of the playing area.

I'm not talking about that. I'm not even blaming them for the stream settings themselves.

The color balance on the jehar+zoot cam has been fucked since the start : given they both look like zombies, the white in the quakecon logo is pinkish and the yellow logos are orange, some retard saw too much red and....turned the saturation way down.

The couch cam yesterday had a fucking floodlight and was overexposed to shit. The one on the stream right now ( Memento / Mesita / Linkin ) has the same fucking floodlight blasting people so hard that Memento's face looks like it's made of rubber.

Basically, it's still the same absolute lack of fucks given to not being a piece of shit with standards lower than the earth's crust showcased proudly by the same happy go lucky people who already couldn't handle anything properly 3+ years ago. They wanted to be tv and it was shit. They still want to be tv, it's still shit.

Fireworks are just explosions. They couldn't possibly be expected to hold the responsibility of making the overall display look and sound incredibly awesome to bring in new viewers and pyrotechnic engineers. Only people with real passion and skiill can do such a thing..

i never had to leave ctfpickup i dont know where you have your believes from. i had a fair share of good matches in the leagues and tournaments. you on the other hand i dont know who you are. check your facts mate.

Low seeded teams always get paired with top seeded teams in their first math. That's how all tournaments work, in everything.

If a lower seeded team says they deserve a better seeding then they must earn it by beating better teams. However, it's quite clear "CC" and its players do not deserve a better seed than their current ones, to the point maybe they should be further lowered. This is the second event in a row in which they haven't been able to take a single map out of a single mid-seeded team or individual player at any gametype, let alone out of a top team or player, so their lower seeding than those does match their results.

In other words, the system used in this tournament isn't based on randomness, isn't something created by Syncerror and, most importantly, certainly isn't made to harm a specific team. CC did not happen to be unluckily paired with the top seeded teams, as you said is a fact, but the complete opposite (not random and 100% based on results).

edit: Suarez should have been punished way more severely and you know it. It was like the fourth bite in his career.

I enjoyed it, either that or maybe AVG's win vs MD, also MD vs break had a really close couple of games IIRC. Also the iG game that had a 20 min overtime was probably good :)

I do wonder if ghs had a chance to practice the newer maps vs teams like MD and AVG if they could have won. They all had MD-like talent. I mean those guys on Spider were just as impressive to spec as any of the MD players.

Ghost Squad vs MD was a great match and an interesting case.
I wonder, if its beneficial for the weakest team to try to drag an opponents into the overtime? (Sure it won't work on a fast map like Iron Works).

For example, in chess, when players compete in a knockout tourney, its a well-known strategy for the underdog to play for a draw and ultra-safe, because each next game will be with a shorter time-control and the price of mistake will rise exponentally, improving the chances of underdog.

The Quake Live TriMaster Tournament will feature competitions for up to sixteen (16) four - player teams, where each team will be put to the test in a triathlon comprised of Capture the Flag (CTF), Team Deathmatch (TDM), and Duel to determine which team can stake their claim to being the one true TriMaster
Champion. Teams who come out on top will share prizes of $32,000. Following the Triathlon Tournament, the top two individual duelers selected by their team will then face off to claim an additional $8,000 and the title of Grand Master Champion.

There is 16k in prize money for duel. 8k for the TEAM with the most points in the duel swiss tournament and 8k for the INDIVIDUAL selected by the two top teams from the previous duel portion which wins the bo5.

It's most likely inadequate bandwidth from quakecons side. The head staff probably gave priority to everything but the quake stream. Same shit different year. Notice how you only see the odd glimpse of a Faceit logo, hiding behind the casters, even they don't want to be associated with that shit. I'm sure they're doing wonders with the resources and shitty schedule they're given.

If the stream only lags with 5+k viewers then it's Twitch, if the lags are independent from the amount of viewers then it's Qcon. Could be a coincidence that the lags only started when the stream got many viewers.

No, Syncerror is one of the few people who actually does give a shit about Quake Live. I mean It's his job ffs. He deserves a fucking medal just for the amount of shit he's had to deal with in the last 10 years.

he is right. syncerror is in charge of these problem. cannot blame other. yes he is ql dev but this do not mean he care about game. i think after 6 years this is true. 6 years of quakecon fails. same problems because no care is given.

Fair enough. But it's looking kind of odd that you're coming forward with this right after losing that final. One immediately wonders if you had said the same thing in case you had won, or if you had rather preferred to silently take the money.

But I agree. It stinks. And not only for 2nd and 3rd. And I *will definitely not* be rooting for tox today. The idea that those guys should take home literally all that money is completely ludicrous.

I didn't "come forward with it". Just reiterating how dumb the whole system is and obviously its the most "fresh on my mind" right after placing 2nd or 3rd (i dont even know which with this system) in both tournaments.

People used to complain when only top3 got anything and everyone was happy when WSVG spread it out further to top8 or even top16. This tourney really feels like a punch in your guts for anyone placing slightly below first.

I just hope they never do that again but eh... its qcon, i'm sure theyll manage to "top" this.

Believe me, I'm just as sad. I've seen all the effort you guys put into this. And you've come a long way, as a team. It's a shame you're not being rewarded in any way for your excellent performance, and it's things like this that make me consistently feel bad about this gaming business. It's not being handled like it is in real sports.

The reason for the approach here is clear I guess There's just so much money they want to spend but the winner's prize still has to look "spectacular". It's totally idiotic and, in essence, a sham.

This time it is. id listened and finally realised they should support teams. It worked. Imagine they had used this format for the last decade. Quake would be in a much stronger position. Quakecon 2015 has proved my point. Thank you sync :)

You're joking, right? They didn't "support" teams, they literally forced all those duellers to come as part of a team, and only as that. Fact is, in terms of cost-benefit this tournament was a huge waste of money. And no, I don't mean for qcon.

This Swiss tournament thingy ended up nicely, seems like the top teams come up at the top of the tables in the end. Also, being the victor takes all principle the rules turned out nicely. MD didn't lose any game in TDM or CTF so they were rightfully the winner of the total prize pool for TDM and CTF.

Frankly, I'm having some problems agreeing. Do I know if anybody overextended himself, given this was the presumably "last major quake tournament on quakecon ever"? If any of those "thank god we had all those players here" is being left with some serious debt? And who cares? Do you?

Of course, I do prefer the spectator perspective very much myself too. It feels kind of convenient. And we don't even need to feel bad. Because Europe is taking care of all of it, thanks to tdm. I'm so glad I just learned this today.

The lag appeared when he did the rj and the rocketlauncher was facing the ground. Next i could see was that he HAD capped.

it was such a FAILCON moment.

But i have to say, that this stream was the most organized one since years. I remember 2 years ago? There was the L/R sound switched and all the admins were saying was "what is the problem, just switch your headphones too"

<imagine godzilla faceplam.jpg here>

Anyway, CTF was really nice to watch and Zyrinx was completely right with his line he dropped after the game. Sometimes i think, that these players take it a small bit too serious. Its quake man. You HAVE to do risky stuff and be aggressive not only if theres only 1 chance left in the end.
Dont get me wrong. I really see the perfect teamwork, but its like football, the audience wants to see attractive scenes. =)

It's good to see a EU team finally win CTF. It's clear the NA drama played a major role in the outcome as the NA teams simply weren't as practiced as the EU teams were. BREAK kicking Mr CTF himself viju was a dumb move. KGB's aim once again didn't translate from online to LAN play but he didn't play bad overall. Was great to see gHs play and they took alot of teams by surprise (out aimming MD was lol!). 102 learning to CTF in a few months time was pretty amazing to see aswell. Last but not least I'm glad f-EM got what was coming to them after all the roster changes and drama it didn't help them one bit and they had a very poor showing.

Also very piss poor coverage this year from the shoutcasting, streaming to the shotty routing and constant drops not to mention a joke of a format that was very random/unfair.

I don't know how 102 was "learning to ctf" but last time I saw them play it was few weeks ago vs mixed pickup team. They were struggling :P Maybe they learned to TDM in CTF? We won't know until they release the demos

.... Just watched a few vods...
I don't really see teams playing CTF, they are more doing TDM with slight variations in moving around the map.

Really, I see basedefs getting their home PU, going on the offence entering enemy base with 150/100 and just lg'ing 3 freshly spawned people (=without real weapons) down, of which 2 then again respawn infront of him at which point he kill both of them... upping the tally to 5, and then eventually dieing to the last fresh spawn....
If there are 3 people there with MG.... Take the flag, move out of the room, possibly spam 1 rocket just to delay their movement as they try to follow you and make sure to not kill any of them until you are at mid (or passed it)... They can't mg you down fast enough.

The TDM games on the other hand were pretty high level. So they are fun to watch :p

What bothers me about this whole drama is the sparks situation.
To me he seems like a nice enough guy. Polite, kind, open and friendly.

What I noticed about him after watching his stream over a couple of months is this:

He seems to have an issue with criticism. And making too many assumptions.
Take the episode with winz, where he was kicked from the server after he streamed some of MD's games.
He didn't know why, but almost immediately started asking questions like; Is winz a racist?
To me, and I'm sure a lot of people, it looked like he was kicked because he was streaming the games. And that's it.
It didn't have to be anything racist about it.

Another thing is his attitude towards certain players.
He seems agressive when someone confronts him about certain things.
An example here is when he was dueling against chance, and he asked him about the Quakecon donations now that he wasn't going.
sparks replied something like this: Why do you care? It's none of your concern! After that, when he was playing him, he was calling him a moron, idiot or what not on stream for several minutes. And I was thinking; Why would he say things like that? Has he got something to hide? I just lost all respect for him at that time.

Now that rapha, cl0ck and zero4 have had their say, it just makes sense to me.
He is to me too proud, I think, and have trouble being a team player.
It looked to me when he was playing with found-Em, that he was mainly doing what he tought might be best for the team, and not what he was told to do. Why this; 'well I don't think that is a good idea, I'll do this instead' kind of attitude? And they weren't winning games.

So in retrospect I can understand why they had to let him go.

whaz I think, went behind their backs deliberately. I don't think he ever meant to go to Quakecon.